Angular or rotational accelerometers are used to measure rotational acceleration about a specific axis. Rotational accelerometers have many applications such as vehicle rollover event prevention, rotational vibration suppression for hard disk drives, airbag deployment and so on. With the advances in MEMS technology various rotational accelerometers that can be fabricated using silicon micromachining techniques have been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,251,484, “Rotational accelerometer,” Oct. 12, 1993; U.S. Pat. No. 6,718,826, “Balanced angular accelerometer,” Apr. 13, 2004; U.S. Pat. No. 5,872,313, Temperature-compensated surface micromachined angular rate sensor,” Feb. 16, 1999; U.S. Pat. No. 6,257,062, “Angular accelerometer,” Jul. 10, 2001. In these applications surface micromachining used to fabricate the moving proof masses. Surface micromachining imposes limits on the structures. For example, the proof mass thickness is limited to the thickness of the deposited films. Surface micromachining also suffers for the stiction problem as a result of sacrificial etching and wet release processes. Therefore proof masses fabricated using this method requires additional supports around the perimeter of the proof mass to reduce stiction and to increase the stability. This results in relatively more complicated devices and stringent requirements for the fabrication of additional springs that would not disturb the operation of the rotational accelerometer. On the other hand bulk micromachining overcomes most of the problems associated with the surface micromachining. U.S. Pat. No. 7,077,007, “Deep reactive ion etching process and microelectromechanical devices formed thereby,” Jul. 18, 1006 describes DRIE etching for bulk micromachined angular accelerometers.
The sensing methods used in MEMS accelerometer vary. Capacitive sensors provide high performance as well as low cost. Because of these features it became the method of choice for most of the consumer market applications. But to be able to obtain high sensitivity and low noise floor the parasitic capacitances need to be reduced or eliminated. This can be achieved by integrating MEMS and electronics. The accelerometers described in the above-identified patents are not integrated with the detection electronics. In a typical system, the detection electronics needs to be connected to the MEMS substrate through wire bonding. Accordingly, this system suffers from increased parasitics and is susceptible to noise and coupling of unwanted signals.
Therefore, there is a need for rotational accelerometers that are fabricated using bulk micromachining methods and integrated with electronics. There is also need for multi-axis accelerometers that are insensitive to linear accelerations. The present invention addresses such needs.